Tuesday, February 26, 2019

February 26, 1880 – The Chicago Daily Tribune offers a lengthy dissertation on “the legislation affecting and defining the rights of the Illinois Central Railroad to a location on the Lake-Front …” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 26, 1880]In the winter of 1851 the Illinois legislature granted the Illinois Central Railway Company a charter to build a railroad from the terminus of the Illinois and Michigan canal to Cairo with a branch line extending to Chicago and another to Galena.A section of the charter stated, “The said corporation shall have the right of way upon, and may appropriate to its sole use and control for the purposes contemplated herein, land not exceeding 200 feet in width through its entire length … All such lands, waters, materials, and privileges belonging to the State are hereby granted to said corporation for said purposes.” There was a limitation contained in the charter, though, an important one for Chicago – “Nothing in the act contained shall authorize said corporation to make a location of their track within any city without the consent of the Common Council of said city.”An amendment to the charter gave Chicago the “power of exercising a police supervision over the harbor for the distance of one mile from the shore line.”In 1852 the Illinois Central asked for a right-of-way into Chicago and the Common Council passed an ordinance granting it on June 14.The ordinance granted the railroad the right to enter the city at a point that would eventually become Thirty-First Street and, following the boundary of Lake Michigan, north “to such grounds as the said Company may acquire between the north line of Randolph street and the Chicago River … upon which grounds shall be located the depot of said railroad within the city, and such other buildings, slips, or apparatus as may be necessary and convenient for the business of the company.”The charter also granted the railroad the right to “use in perpetuity” a width of 300 feet from Twelfth Street to the northern line of Randolph Street, ground that had to be not less than 400 feet west of Michigan Avenue and parallel to it.By 1856 the company had created land from the lake according to the distance specified in the charter.On September 15, 1856 the Common Council gave the company permission to create additional land east of its right-of-way.Thirteen years later the Illinois legislature, in what came to be known as the “Lake-Front Bill,” gave the city control, formerly exercised by the state, of the lakefront between Monroe Street and Park Row, today’s Twelfth Street.The bill also gave “all the right and title of the State of Illinois in and to the submerged lands constituting the bed of Lake Michigan and lying east of the tracks and breakwater of the Illinois Central Railroad Company for the distance of one mile” to the Illinois Central from today’s Roosevelt Road to the river, provided the railroad continue to pay to the state seven percent of its gross earnings, an amount specified in the railroad’s original charter.Under this law the three railroads running along the lakefront – the Illinois Central, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, and the Michigan Central – were directed to pay the city $800,000 at intervals within a year of the passage of the act.On April 15, 1873 the legislature repealed this act.Despite the repeal, however, in 1880, the year this article appeared in the Tribune, the company maintains that its riparian rights are still intact, holding that “it is a well-established principle in law that the land under navigable waters, to which no private owner has any claim by virtue of his land abutting the water’s edge, belongs to the State, and not to the Federal Government, with the limitation, however, that nothing shall be done to it to interfere with navigation.”The Illinois Central asserts that it has followed all of the stipulations of the 1869 act “and no subsequent action of the Legislature of a repealing character can be of any avail.”The city maintains, though, that a quid pro quo was established at the time of the 1856 agreement in which the city ceded an extra 100-foot strip of land from Randolph Street to what is now Roosevelt Road and, in return, the railroad agreed to erect a breakwater along that stretch of shoreline to prevent erosion that was threatening to wash Michigan Avenue into the lake.City lawyers also state that the city never accepted the $800,000 specified in the 1869 law, further noting that when the 1869 law was passed, there were “Several property-owners on Michigan avenue, in the immediate vicinity, who had an easement in that portion of the property north of Madison street, and believed that the erection of a depot thereon would seriously damage their lands fronting Michigan avenue”.A judge granted them an injunction, writing that “in view of the original dedication of the property in question as public ground to be forever free from buildings, it was not in the power of the State or the city to alienate it for another purpose.”Therein lies the issue in 1880 – the railroad was forbidden to put up any buildings between Randolph and Monroe “but there was no prohibition … against filling in or laying tracks.”The issue of riparian rights and the struggle between the city and the railroads over the lakefront would not stop here.It would continue for another century. The photo shows the lakefront sometime around the time of the Tribune article.

February 26, 1954 – The Chicago Daily Tribune reports that two of the city’s oldest buildings will soon fall to the wrecking ball. Plans are to replace the first, the 62-year-old Wilkinson Building at the southeast corner of Washington and Wells Streets, with a three-story parking facility for 500 cars. Known as the Teutonic Building when it was constructed, it was renamed for Theodore Roosevelt before the new owner, John C. Wilkinson, gave the family name to the structure after purchasing it for $175,000 in 1946. The second building, a five-story structure at the northwest corner of Washington and Dearborn Streets, will have its three top floors demolished and the remaining two floors rebuilt into a “modern two-story shop and office building.” [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27, 1954] The building was purchased in October of 1953 for $400,000 with the rebuilding of the structure estimated to cost $135,000. You won’t find anything left of the building there today … the location is approximately where the flagpoles stand on Daley Plaza. Pretty good job of peeking into the future for the 100 North Dearborn Corporation, the owners of the property – it picks up a corner lot a block away from the seat of city and county government for a half million bucks that ten years later the city would have to acquire in order to build its slick mid-century modern civic center. The original Teutonic Building is shown in the Rand McNally drawing in the top photo. The second photo shows that the parking facility that took its place in the mid-1950's is still parking cars just east of the Wells Street elevated tracks.

February 26, 1912 -- Ebenezer Buckingham dies at his residence, 2036 Prairie Avenue. A graduate of Yale University, Buckingham came to Chicago in 1850, and in 1865 took over management of the grain elevators located at the Illinois Central depot at the mouth of the Chicago River. By 1873 he and his brother, John, had increased the capacity of the elevators from 700,000 bushels to 2.9 million bushels. Investing wisely as the city exploded both in population and in industry, Buckingham became the president of the Northwestern National Bank in 1890. In 1853 Buckingham married Lucy Sturges, and a son, Clarence, and two daughters, Kate and Lucy, were born to the couple. It was the death of Clarence Buckingham that led Kate Buckingham to provide the generous gift of the fountain dedicated to the memory of her brother that sits today at the head of Congress Avenue.

February 26, 1903 -- With the payment of $100,000 the Studebaker brothers become absolute owners of the Fine Arts Building and the ground beneath it. The ground on which the building stood had been held in a 99-year lease that began in May of 1885 with an annual ground rent of $2,000. The building, designed by Solon Spencer Beman, opened in 1886 with a four-story annex added for use by the Art Institute in 1898. On July 7, 1978 the building was declared a Chicago City Landmark. The photo below shows the building as it looked in 1900.